For the most part, good riddance!

It's safe to say 1961 was not approached with high expectations, so how did it do?

Well, it was a very mixed bag of a year - there were some excellent albums, some really not so excellent ones and a load of "well, we've never heard anything like this before" albums. We had a lot of soundtracks, multiple visits and men - we only saw seven women in the entire chart all year. We also had a week where we had no albums at all because we'd already considered all the albums in the chart. Weirdly, I can't find a year-end chart for 1961 but I think it's probably safe to assume we'll have listened to the whole chart and if Elvis and South Pacific aren't the top two, I'll be amazed - so let's start by considering those two categories first...

Yes, we had so many Elvis albums this year we can consider them as a separate category - and they're a surprisingly disparate bunch. We had two film soundtrack albums, with GI Blues being way ahead of Blue Hawaii for me, and we had three studio albums, of which I preferred Something For Everybody (a standard offering) but His Hand In Mine (his gospel collection) was definitely an interesting listen.

Considering the soundtracks, I'm going to first consider musicals (both film and stage versions) and there's an easy winner for me here with My Fair Lady being one of my favourite musicals of all time and it was interesting to listen to the stage version with Julie as opposed to the film version (with Marni, obviously). Of the others, I think The Music Man was probably my second favourite, which was a pleasant surprise that I'd not heard before with Oliver! not being far behind. I wasn't as impressed with either South Pacific or Seven Brides For Seven Brothers as many others are and Stop The World I Want To Get Off is just bizarre. We also saw a couple of film soundtracks - Exodus, which I didn't see the point to at all and King Kong, which I found surprisingly enjoyable.

Having done Elvis, let's do some of the other multiple visits we had this year. Well first we have to mention Shirley Bassey - she may have "only" had two visits, but she was the queen of the year and I really quite liked both of them because she had such a great voice. Frank Sinatra was determined to not be outdone by Elvis and so also appeared five times (it would have been six if I hadn't drawn the line at a best-of album) and I can report they were all perfectly fine with Swing Easy! being the best, but there was nothing on any of them to get too excited about. 

Cliff Richard and The Shadows (together or apart) "only" appeared four times and two surprised - Me And My Shadows was considerably better than I was expecting and The Shadows were somehow worsened by the absence of Cliff (not a sentence I'd expected to write). Johnny Mathis was a very pleasant surprise on both his albums - I preferred them to all of Frank's offerings. Two further multiple entries that were perfectly fine, but very inessential were The Everly Brothers (twice) and Buddy Holly and The Crickets (three times, either together or apart). And then finally we step up the level of bizarreness to Ray Conniff and The George Mitchell Minstrels (both twice) who I will discuss further later.

There were a surprisingly number of (mostly) instrumental offerings from the guys this year and Duke Ellington was far and away the best of these with an album I really enjoyed - and I can't say the same about Duane Eddy, Acker Bilk, Glenn Miller, Johnny And The Hurricanes or Russ Conway, with the latter being particularly dreadful. Ray Conniff deserves a special mention, firstly for multiple visits and secondly for making what was quite patently very strange music surprisingly listenable - it defied description.

We now have the solo singing artists - and boy was this category a disappointment this year. The only albums that I'd say were acceptable were Eddie Cochran, who was quite interesting if not really my sort of thing and Frankie Laine, who wasn't that great, but was at least amusingly odd. Other albums that weren't amusing were John Hanson who was merely odd but we also had Anthony Newley and Adam Faith - for both, the level of skill on display was amazing(ly low, in case I wasn't clear).

Now we come to probably the smallest category of the year - the women!  As previously mentioned, the queen of the year was undoubtedly Shirley Bassey - not only was she the only woman we met who was allowed to carry the album on her own, but she did it twice.  The other ladies we met were Peggy Lee who made some lovely noises with George Shearing, Nina who made some absolutely horrible noises with Frederik and Sophia Loren who did whatever was she did with Peter Sellers.  I feel I should also mention Dorothy Provine, Eartha Kitt and Connie Francis who I think are the only other women we saw in the entire chart all year - which is pretty poor now, isn't it?

And now we have the "other" category - and boy were there some curious items in here. "Comedy" albums were surprising popular and I really quite liked The Goon Show offering and I'm at least happy that Bob Newhart and Beyond The Fringe had some comedic value, even if I didn't always tune in to it (unlike Peter Sellers' contributions to his and Sophia's album, which had no comedy merit at all). Next to discuss here are The George Mitchell Minstrels - unique in the history of this blog in that I gave them two albums in one post just so I didn't have to write about their abominations twice (and that's before we even consider the racial element). And finally, there was one album that easily stood out (from some tough competition) as weirder than all the rest - the Huckleberry Hound offering which was just plain bizarre (and charted for twelve weeks!).

One final thing to mention is that four of the albums we saw this year were linked in that they had a version of "I Could Have Danced All Night" on them - Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews, Johnny Mathis and Ray Conniff all gave it a go. It also appeared on a Peggy Lee album that we didn't meet, but we'll be catching up with that in '60 (and let me assure you that won't be happening for a VERY long time.

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we had seven different chart-toppers from five different artists, of which Elvis was at the top for 25 weeks, George Mitchell 13, South Pacific 8, The Shadows 5 and poor old Cliff just the one.  I'm not really sure what more to say about that other than it seems quite odd that Frank never got that close to the top spot. Unsurprisingly, we never had an album come straight in at #1 - whereas nowadays it seems to be only Taylor Swift that prevents that happening.

The generally accepted best albums of the year that we've not met are Bobby Bland's Two Steps From The Blues, John Coltrane's My Favourite Things, Chubby Checker's Your Twist Party With The King Of The Twist (he spotted his niche early and he stuck with it!) and a load of other US jazz and blues albums that I've never heard of and never made the chart over here - it certainly feels that, with the exception of Johnny Mathis, 1961 Britain was not ready for US music unless it had a white face (I also very much doubt that George Mitchell went down a storm over there).

The most read post of the year was Frank Sinatra's Nice 'N Easy (which is possibly one of the least commentworthy albums of the year) and the least read post concerned Glenn Miller, which certainly wasn't an album I had a lot to say about, so you didn't miss much!

Overall, this year has just been very peculiar - so few albums but so many multiple visits and so many just plain bizarre offerings, even making allowances for "things being different back then". My Fair Lady is easily my pick of the year, but I was already very familiar with it - of the new visits, I'd also mention out GI Blues, Duke Ellington (a really interesting idea), Eddie Cochran, The Goon Show, Peggy Lee & George Shearing and both of Shirley's offerings as being worthy of a listen. I'm also quite impressed at what Ray Conniff did, without going as far as to say I actually liked it.

So, where to next? It has to be the 2010's which is the only decade we haven't visited twice yet and since we've done both 2010 and 2020 it seems to make sense to pick 2015. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything that I particularly recall from that year so it will be interesting to see what it throws up. A few more women and lot less strangeness than 1961, I'd imagine...

Btw a copy of the first edition of Private Eye (shown above, published on 25 October of this year) is currently available on eBay if you fancy if - your's for a mere £14,900!

01/01/61 - A fine way to end the year
25/12/15 (blog timeline) - A slightly successful album